


The Poindexter House

by Liminal_Space_LLC



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fluff, Found Family, Halloween, Haunting, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 01:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16466465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liminal_Space_LLC/pseuds/Liminal_Space_LLC
Summary: Derek Nurse and his young son Justin have found an affordable house in a good school district, everything Derek ever hoped for. But there's one caveat: the old Poindexter house is haunted by a fiend so devilish no one has lived there for fifteen years.(Inspired bythis post.)





	The Poindexter House

The green-eyed man and his brown-eyed son move into the old Poindexter house when the brown-eyed son is five years old. The father is of an age that the people of their new small town think is too young to have a five-year old son. The green-eyed man secretly agrees.

The old Poindexter house is a fine house for a place that has been abandoned for fifteen years. There are no leaks. There are no drafts. The appliances all function perfectly. The green-eyed man does not think to ask who has kept the place in such excellent form; he is merely relieved at finding such an affordable location in the school district.

The people of the small town know why the house has been abandoned for fifteen years, and they suspect who has kept it in such excellent form. Yet when they try to tell the young man with his little-but-not-little-enough son, he does not believe them.

But they are right. And they fear for him. And they fear for the little boy more, for no child has stepped foot in that house in living memory. And no child deserves that.

***

It is a few months before the green-eyed man realizes something is wrong. It is the little boy who first mentions the figure in the mirror. “It just looks at me, Daddy.”

The green-eyed man begins to see the figure. At the corner of his vision. In the shadows of the mirror. In the blue darkness of the night.

He finds words in his notebook he did not write. Words written in letters like a knife in ink like tar. Words that tell him to run.

He knows now why the old Poindexter house has been empty for fifteen years.

But he cannot leave. His son is starting school. The man cannot afford to start again in a new place; he could barely afford to start here, in a long-abandoned house haunted by a strange figure. His son seems okay. The figure does not seem to frighten him or hurt him.

So they stay.

***

The brown-eyed boy does not understand the figure that appears in his mirror. It is not like the monsters under his bed because he can see it, though he cannot tell what it looks like. It lingers at the edge of his vision.

He can feel it staring at him, but it does not seem like it will hurt him. It just looks at him. Whenever he takes his clothes off or takes a bath, it disappears. He thinks it may not know what he is, so one day he says, as it hovers vaguely in the dark, “My name is Justin and I am five years old. What is your name?” The figure does not answer.

The figure does not speak until Justin is lying in bed, practicing his alphabet. He gets to the letter “P” and cannot remember what comes next. He squeezes his eyes closed to focus and starts over again. But he can’t get past “P,” so he tries again. And then again. He thinks he might cry, but he doesn’t want to cry because he’s big now, and he shouldn’t cry about the alphabet. And if he cries, he will wake up his Daddy, and Daddy said he wants to sleep a lot tonight because tomorrow is a Suit Day. But he starts sniffling, and he thinks he’s going to cry when a voice says “Q.”

Justin is sure it is the figure in the dark. The voice came from the corner where it usually hovers. He is so surprised he forgets to cry.

He tries to sing alphabet again, and this time he finishes. “Thank you, corner person!” he says. Then he goes to sleep.

After that, whenever Daddy’s bedtime stories don’t make him fall asleep right away, he does his alphabet or his numbers or his colors with the figure in the dark. The voice never says very much, just the name of the thing he’s forgetting, but he thinks they are friends now.

Sometimes, he tells the person in the dark about all the exciting things that happen at school that he forgot to tell his Daddy. His best friend is named Adam, and they go on all sorts of adventures. One day they collect all the yellow leaves and jump in it like they’re Scrooge McDuck. One day they have a snowball fight. One day, a butterfly lands on Adam’s butt so it’s a butt-erfly.

The figure in the dark doesn’t really say anything back for a long time. Then, Justin’s daddy goes on a date with a man they met at the Stop and Shop. The babysitter doesn’t tell a very good story, and Justin tells the figure in the dark. “That was a really bad story.”

And the figure in the dark says, “Do you want me to tell you a story?”

For the first time, Justin is afraid. In the corner, the figure is still hazy, but he can see clearly two glowing gold eyes. Like a tiger. He hides under his blankets.

Then the voice says, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Justin. I’ll go.”

He peeks his head over the covers. The glowing gold eyes are gone. He lies in the dark for a long time, wishing he hadn’t told his daddy he was too grown up for a nightlight. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to sleep, but he can’t. He wishes the figure in the dark were there to do the alphabet with him.

He keeps his head covered in his blankets and says, “You can tell me a story.”

Justin feels the figure return. “Only if you want me to.”

He keeps his head covered, but he says, “Yes, please.”

The figure in the dark tells him a story about a girl with very long hair trapped in a tall house, though Justin falls asleep before he hears the end.

***

Like many small children, Justin keeps secrets by accident. No one knows that the brown-eyed little boy who lives in Poindexter House and the golden-eyed fiend who haunts it become friends, simply because it never occurs to the little boy to tell anyone. It is merely a fact of his life that when he cannot fall asleep, he hears stories from a shadow in the corner, and sometimes the shadow helps him clean his room when he can’t reach a spot.

Justin doesn’t even know the shadow’s name until his daddy mentions one day that it’s rude not to call someone by their name. It takes the shadow a long time to reply to Justin’s question, but the shadow says, “Will. My name was Will.”

Justin asks, “What’re your prones? I’m hehimhis.”

The shadow pauses. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you a boy or a girl or a something else?”

“I’m a boy,” replies the shadow, “What is a something else?” The shadow seems confused.

“There are non-bunny people and agent-deer people, and other kinds of people, too, I think. I have a Bibi Lardo who is non-bunny, and we call them ‘them.’”

The shadow stares at Justin for a long moment and replies, “Okay.”

Over the years, as the brown-eyed boy and the shadow get to know each other better, the shadow morphs from a formless darkness in the corner into a man’s silhouette, then into a transparent but distinctly redheaded blur. By the time the boy starts bringing home math homework in the third grade, the shadow is unmistakably a pale, red-haired man, though he is translucent, and, below the hem of his flannel shirt, his body is indistinct.

Though young, the brown-eyed boy is highly observant. He sees his father falling asleep next to him on the couch and working at his desk long after bedtime—glimpsed by the boy on his way to get a glass of water—and comes to a conclusion. So when his third grade teacher tells him he needs to practice his times tables at home, he asks the shadow, “Do you know the two times table?”

The shadow says, “yes,” and the boy does not have to ask his father to do times tables instead of reading him stories.

Though children and shadows number among the greatest keepers of secrets, the green-eyed father is a sharp one, and when he walks up the stairs one night to call his son to dinner, he hears the strange voice of a grown man in his child’s room, and his heart turns cold with fear.

He slams open the door to find his son perched on the edge of his bed with his legs crossed, facing a pale, ghostly man the father has never seen before.

“Who the hell are you?” he yells.

The pale man turns to face him, and the father is glad to see his golden eyes are wide with fear.

“Daddy,” says the boy, “this is Will!”

The father crosses so he is standing between the pale man and his son. “Get the fuck out of my house, Will,” the father growls, but the pale man seems frozen to the spot.

The boy interjects, “He can’t leave, Daddy. He lives here, too.”

“You’ve been living in our house?” he spits in the pale man’s face.

The pale man sputters, “No, I mean, yes, but I—I—”

“Will is dead,” pipes up the boy.

The father does not take his eyes off the man. “What do you mean, ‘he’s dead,’ baby?”

“He died a long time ago, and he used to live in this house when he was alive, so now that he’s dead he stays in the house.”

The father looks the pale man in the face and realizes he can almost see through the man to the dresser on the other side. He remembers the people of the town telling him that the Poindexter House was haunted. Even through his anger, he can see some kind of sense beginning to form.

“If you can’t leave the house,” he tells the pale man grimly, “then get out my son’s room. But you and I are going to have a talk very soon.”

The pale man nods quickly and zooms out the bedroom door, not quite running but not quite flying either.

The father turns to his son and gathers him up in his arms and squeezes him to his chest. “Justin, oh my god, baby,” he mutters into his son’s hair. “Are you okay?”

The son hugs his father’s neck. “Yeah, daddy, I’m okay. You don’t have to worry.”

The father pulls away and brushes his son’s cheek. “What was that man doing in your room?”

Justin smiles. “We were doing math! Will does homework with me sometimes.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“We used to do the alphabet together, but he wasn’t a person then. He couldn’t talk very well.”

The father squeezes his son’s hand. “Do you mean when you were in pre-school?”

Justin nods, and his father hugs him. “Oh god, that must have been so scary, honey. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t scary! He’s nice, daddy. He’s my friend.”

The father raises his eyebrows skeptically. “Your friend?”

Justin nods solemnly. His father sighs. “Has he ever tried to touch you or look at you when you don’t have clothes on?”

The boy shakes his head. “No, never.”

The father puts his hand atop his son’s head. “Okay. I’m going to go talk to him. But I don’t want you to talk to him until I say it’s okay. And if he tries to talk to you, I want you to come tell me. Understand?”

Justin chews his lip and nods. The father kisses his son’s forehead and whispers, “I love you, J.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

The green-eyed man walks downstairs, into the kitchen, and calls into the air, “Hey, ghost. We need to talk.”

Immediately, a chalk-white man with a shock of red hair on his head appears across the kitchen table, looking cautiously at the green-eyed man.

The man looks back at the ghost with distaste. “Can you hear everything in this house?”

“Only if I’m listening,” the ghost replies, quietly. “I don’t listen if it’s a private conversation.”

“Uh-huh.” The father is tempted to tell this bastard to never talk to his son again. Maybe start working on finding a new place. But Justin seems strangely fond of this guy, so he thinks he probably owes it to his son to think this through carefully. “Who are you?”

The ghost nods. “My name was Will Poindexter. I grew up in this house, and I’ve been here ever since I died.”

“When was that?”

“Sometime in the seventies, I think.”

“The people of this town told me this place had a ghost who’s chased out every person who tried to live here for the past thirty years.” He’s satisfied to see the ghost look uncomfortable. “Was that you?”

The ghost closes his eyes. “Yes.”

“Well, what the fuck was that about?”

 “After I died, I…forgot who I was. I forgot that my family had left. I forgot that I was dead. I became something inhuman. And I think I didn’t like strangers in my house, so I tried to make them go away.” The ghost opens his eyes and looks at the man nervously.

“Why didn’t you do that to us?” the father asks.

The ghost’s forehead creases. “I’m not sure. I don’t remember very clearly. I think I did it a little bit, but I started talking to Justin, and I sort of started being a person again.”

The green-eyed man stares at him. “And now you do homework with him.”

“He asked me for help.”

“I’m his father!”

The ghost gives the man a dubious look. “And he knows you are incredibly busy! You work all the time. He wants to make things easier for you.”

The man grits his teeth. “I am supposed to do those things with him. He is my son.”

The ghost stares at him incredulously. “You sleep four hours a night! It’s not a crime to let someone else lend a hand.”

“Do you watch me fucking sleep?” The man steps back, retreating toward the door. He wants to just grab his son and run out of this place.

“No!” the ghost shouts defensively. “But I can see when the lights go out in your room and when you start making coffee!”

“Oh my god, this is so fucked up.” The father closes his green eyes and comes to a decision. “Justin and I are leaving. Are you going to try to stop us?”

There is a long moment of silence. The man holds his breath and hopes.

“Of course not,” the ghost says softly. “Tell him goodbye for me, if that’s okay with you.”

When the man opens his eyes, the ghost is gone. He breathes a long sigh of relief and goes to talk to his son.

The green-eyed man and his brown-eyed son spend the night with the Birkholtzes. The father tells David and Hannah Birkholtz that his house is being fumigated, and, in spite of the thin excuse, they happily invite Derek and his son into their home. Justin and Derek spend a pleasant evening listening to the merry conversation among the buoyant Birkholtz children, forgetting for a little while the strange circumstances of their visit.

But after Derek flops into bed, he hears a soft knock at his door. He calls, “come in,” and his son peers in.

“Hi, daddy.”

Derek waves his son over. “Come on in, baby. Come sit with me.”

Justin climbs onto the bed and curls into his father’s arms. Derek buries his face in his son’s pajama-soft shoulder and smells his warm, clean smell and wishes he could wrap himself like armor around his little boy and protect him from harm forever.

“Daddy,” Justin says, “are we going to go home?”

Derek sighs. He knew this was coming. “I don’t know, J. We have a ghost living in our house. We might need to find a new place to live.”

“But Will is nice! We can live with him. We’ve always lived with him, and he never did anything bad.”

Derek meets his son’s eye. “Grown ups aren’t allowed to talk to you without me saying it’s okay. Especially in your room. He broke some very big rules, sweetie.”

“But I asked him to!”

“He’s the grown up,” Derek explained gently, “It’s his responsibility for him not to break the rules.”

“But he wasn’t even a person before!” Justin protests, squirming out of his father’s arms, “It’s not fair! He didn’t know it was against the rules, and now he’s getting punished. It’s so unfair!”

“Justin—” Derek tries to speak, but his son is storming out of the room, presumably to go back to Adam’s room. Derek sighs and lies back against his pillows rubbing his eyes and trying to figure out what the hell he’s going to do.

***

He finds a hotel where they stay for a couple of days while Derek looks at apartments in the area and Justin sulks. Since the first night at the Birkholtzes, Justin has refused to speak.

The impasse between father and son lasts four days, until Derek realizes he can’t afford any of the apartments in the area, especially if he has to keep paying off a mortgage on a house that people think is haunted.

So while his son is at school, the father returns to the house.

“Hello?” he calls as he takes off his coat. “Ghost?”

The ghost immediately appears before him, but he looks different than the green-eyed man remembers. His features have blurred, and he’s more transparent than before. “You’re back,” says the ghost, seeming unsure whether to be alarmed or not.

“I’m back,” the green-eyed man agrees. “I want to talk.”

The green-eyed man did his research. He discovered records of a local man named William Poindexter who died of a brain aneurysm at the age of thirty-five in 1977. He found records showing the Poindexter family did not leave the house until the eighties, when there began to be reports of strange incidents in the house. It seems to him that this golden-eyed ghost is telling the truth about who he is.

So the green-eyed man explains to the ghost that he and the brown-eyed boy will continue to live in the Poindexter house, but that new rules must be set in place: the ghost may not go into Justin’s room, and the ghost is only allowed to talk to Justin in his father’s presence. The ghost agrees immediately, much to the green-eyed man’s surprise.

Though a moment later, the ghost says, “My name is Will.”

“I know,” the green-eyed man replies. More out of habit than anything, he continues, “My name is Derek.”

“Well, Derek,” says the ghost, Will, “if you need help with anything, let me know. I’m pretty handy. I’ve taken care of this house for a long time.”

Derek’s reply is polite but chilly: “I’m fine. Thank you.”

Derek and Justin move back in a day later, much to Justin’s delight. As soon as they are through the door, Justin yells, “Hi Will! We’re back!” and Will appears immediately, smiling broadly.

“Hey, Justin. How was school today?” Will asks, and Justin launches into a story as Derek wonders whether he has made an enormous mistake.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you want to read more of my things, I am also on [tumblr](https://liminal-space-llc.tumblr.com).


End file.
